IRISH GEOGRAPHY
BULLETIN OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF
IRELAND
LAND HOLDING AND SETTLEMENT IN THE COOLEY
PENINSULA OF LOUTH
T. JONES HUGHES
University College, Dublin
Few sections of the eastern coastland of Ireland possess such
a variegated landscape, both physical and cultural, as the
peninsula which separates Carh'ngford Lough from Dundalk
Bay in north county Louth. Although only 60 square miles
in area it shares in three of the country's main physiographic
provinces. Moreover, throughout Irish history this part of
Louth has acted as frontier country—not least when the three
Celtic kingdoms of Meath, Oriel and Ulidia met in the vicinity
of Dundalk Harbour. Yet the peninsula's distinctiveness has
always been well-attested as is shown by the survival of the
regional name Cooley (Cuailnge). For our purpose Cooley rs
taken to be coextensive with the barony of Lower Dundalk,
whose landward limits coincide in the north with the LouthArmagh border and in the west with those of the seventeenthcentury lordship of Ballymascanlan.
The peninsula's uplands are a part of the Tertiary igneous
complex of east Ulster. A core of acidic granophyres, which
culminates in the northwest in Clermont Cam (1,674 feet), has
been eroded into subdued and rounded slopes and these stand
in marked contrast to the craggy and precipitous scarps of the
encircling gabbro ring-dyke. Only in Glenmore is the continuity
of the gabbro ring decisively broken and gentle valley slopes
and platforms strike deep into the remote heart of the mountain
mass. Elsewhere the bleak and greatly exposed uplands never
seem to have made a significant contribution to the local
economy until the introduction of sheep in great numbers late
149
in the last century, and most of the land above 400 feet, or
one-half the total area of Cooley, remains unenclosed.
On the landward side of the igneous uplands, in Faughart,
are ridges of shales and slates of lower Palaeozoic age generally
aligned from northwest to southeast. These rarely exceed
300 feet in height and they carry a thin but continuous drift
cover. Here light and friable soils on well-drained slopes
have provided the basis for a crop-and-grass husbandry with
long leys, a type of land management which is otherwise rare
in Cooley. In addition, with the development of land communication and the expansion of industrial activity in northeast "Ulster from the late eighteenth century, Faughart, at the
southern end of the Gap of the North, came to be on the main
routeway between the two leading centres of population
in modern Ireland. At a time when the remainder of the
peninsula was suffering from increasing isolation as a result of
the decline in sea traffic, Faughart was, for this reason, attracting to itself new economic activities and local landowners were
establishing permanent residences in the area.
The regional connotation of the name Cooley, in the past as
well as at present, sometimes involved the Carboniferous
limestone lowlands of the southeastern end of the peninsula
alone, thus suggesting the pre-eminence of this section in the
evolution of the region. With their varied mantle of glacial
debris the role played by these calcareous plains in relation to
north Louth would not be unlike that of the ' kingdom of
Mourne' on the north side of the lough in relation to south
Down. Cooley's reputation as a tillage area rests on the
fertility of this clay plain. In 1851, for example, one-quarter
of the cultivated area of Carlingford District Electoral Division
(4,900 acres) was under barley and some of the highest land
values (over £1 per acre) recorded in Ireland at this time were
found here.
I
An early indication of the significance of the calcareous
lowlands in the history of colonisation and settlement in
Cooley is provided by the occurrence of the generic element
baile (lit., a homestead) in place-names. In eastern Leinster
baile is frequently associated with a personal name of Norman
origin and as such is anglicised as ' town.' Baile and ' town '
names in Cooley are almost entirely confined to the plains of
the southeast and south and may indicate areas of early per150
manent settlement, involving tillage by members of extended
families, within well-defined territories. By contrast the early
placenames found elsewhere in the peninsula are usually
Gaelic toponyms which express the physical qualities of an
area, as if with a view to initial colonisation. Furthermore the
nature of the mid-nineteenth-century surnames or patronymics
found in Cooley suggests that there existed a large proportion
of Gaelic names, with a widespread
distribution in Ireland as
a whole, within this baile zone.1 Names such as Murphy,
Finnegan and Connor, which are numerous in these claylands,
may represent some of the oldest. patronymics extant in
Cooley. Elsewhere in the peninsula surnames have a strong
northern flavour which may be attributed to the migration of
Ulster Gaels into this part of north Louth, mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
From the late twelfth century Cooley, in common with other
physically favoured peninsulas in northeast Ireland (Ards,
Lecale and Mourne, for example), experienced Anglo-Norman
colonisation. This event served to emphasise the distinctive
nature of the clay plains. They were carved out into compact
estates among secular proprietors who often bore the names of
leading Hiberno-Norman families in medieval Leinster—
Dowdall (Castlecooley), Sograve (Grange), White (Bellurgan
and Maddoxtown) and Plunkett (Templetown). The outline
of these early estates is still preserved in the layout of the baile
townlands and traces of the fortified residences or castles at
Ballug, Cornwallis (Grange) and Castletown remind us of
efforts to defend these lands, often unsuccessfully, against the
Gaels of the hills. In any case there were no Irish left among
the freeholders of seventeenth century Cooley. All the Catholic
forfeiters at the time of the Cromwellian confiscations bore
Norman and ' Old English ' names.2
As elsewhere in the feudalised parts of Ireland, land that
for various reasons was not colonised by farmers was allocated
in substantial lots to monastic establishments of continental
origin. In Cooley the Hugh de Lacy grant led to the division of
the peninsula along the main mountain watershed between the
Cistercian abbots of Mellifont and Newry. Mellifont's granges
embraced most of Faughart as well as the south-facing
mountain slopes as far as Glenmore and the river Piedmont.
The abbot of Newry's estates in Louth covered the northeastfacing slopes of the Cooley mountains as well as a portion of
the clay lowlands beyond the town of Carlingford. Only that
section of the plain that lies between Greenore Point3 and
the Piedmont river therefore remained in secular hands. The
dichotomy between the large pastoral estates of the west and
151
the north on the one hand, and the small tillage estates of
the southeast on the other, which was a cardinal feature of the
state of land holding in the nineteenth century, thus has its
roots back in medieyal times.
With the dissolution of monastic property in the sixteenth
century the granges of Newry abbey in Mourne as well as in
Louth were in 1588 transferred to a Marshal of the English
army, Sir Nicholas Bagenal, a Protestant. In 1715 the heirs to
the Louth section of the Bagenal estate were members of the
influential Anglesey family (Fig. 1). The Protestant successor
to the Mellifont property was Sir Garrett Moore, the Earl of
Drogheda, who built for himself a castle at Ballymascanlan
and whose estate is sometimes referred to in seventeenthcentury documents as the ' lordship of Ballymascanlan.' In
1777 the lordship became the property of the FortescueClermont family and as such it survived intact into this
century to be transferred to the occupying tenants in accordance with the provisions of the 1903 Land Act. The Anglesey
lands, on the other hand, fell prey to the Incumbered Estates
Court and by 1870 this estate had been completely dismembered.
Because most of Cooley was monastic property which at
an early date had fallen into Protestant hands as large secular
estates, the peninsula escaped the worst turmoils associated
with the tenurial changes of the seventeenth century. Cooley's
landscape is thus a notable outcome of long-established and
large-scale landlordism. The one important exception involved
the southeastern claylands. The small Ascendancy proprietors
here bore fresh English and Protestant names such as Brabazon,
Upton, Tipping and Stanage, but few of these came to reside in
Cooley. They were represented locally by privileged
leaseholders who were themselves ' New English,'4 and the
descendants of these men figured prominently among the
early nineteenth century
£20 and £50 ' freeholders' of the
barony of Dundalk.5
At a time when all seemed lost to the Gael in Cooley, the
peninsula—in common with other hitherto thinly populated
parts of north Leinster and north Connacht, especially those
sections of the drumlin belt which lay adjacent to the planted
counties of Ulster—came, from the seventeenth century, to
act as areas of refuge for the dispossessed. Large family groups
such as those bearing the names Rice, Traynor, MacCann and
O'Neill, which were so numerous in the mountain localities of
Omeath, Glenmore and Ballymackellett in the nineteenth
century, could trace their ancestry
back to Armagh, Tyrone,
Deny and even to Donegal.6 In 1854,7 out of a total of 72
152
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i
thtttU
F
1
ANGLESEY
CLERMONT
I" " "1
OTHER MAJOR ESTATES
I
MINOR ESTATES
I
*
COUNTRY HOUSES
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tf<
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S
FIG. 1—The condition of land ownership, 1854
Based on the Ordnance Survey by permission of the Government.
different surnames in the peninsula which were each borne by
ten or more families, it was estimated that at least one-half
were names that were far more numerous in Ulster than in any
other part of Ireland (Fig. 2). These included some of the most
common names in Cooley at the time—Rice, MacKeon, Boyle
and Traynor. In this way hill communities in Cooley acquired
characteristics different from those of the old Gaels of the
plains and, in the nineteenth century at least, intermarriage
between hillsman and plainsman was infrequent. The intrusive
nature of the hillsman is best illustrated at the end of the
century, when the distribution of spoken Irish in eastern
Leinster had become highly localised, for Omeath and some
adjoining areas had by this time ironically become the last
surviving outposts of the southeast Ulster dialect. The
strengthening of the Gaelic and Catholic element in the
population in this way may be reflected in the presence of five
Catholic churches and resident priests in the peninsula in the
late eighteenth century, at a time when Catholic places of
worship were rare in many parts of northern Ireland. It is
also evident in the nature of land holding and settlement.
By 1840 the rudiments of the present cultural landscape
were already in existence. The population had almost8 attained
its maximum, the upper limit of enclosure for tillage had been
reached, and the main arteries of the road network (apart from
the Famine relief roads across the hills) were already laid down.
The corresponding pattern of fields and settlement closely
resembled the present one. In effect the modern landscape
embodies many features which are residual from the period
c. 1740 to 1840, which was possibly the greatest constructive
phase in the history of Cooley. Major subsequent additions
such as the lough-side resort at Omeath or the railway port at
Greenore were but indirectly related to the local economy.
The post-Famine period, which saw the collapse or abolition of
landlordism, has been, in many ways, one of increasing
introspection. Between 1841 and 1861 the population of the
region fell from 20,200 to 13,300 and despite the general
increase in the mobility of the population, local inbreeding
did not diminish later in the century. Moreover the area
remained outside the range of the major post-Famine rehabilitation schemes which elsewhere in Ireland led to farreaching social and economic changes. Thus, although Cooley
contained pockets of great population congestion, no part of
the peninsula came within the jurisdiction of the Congested
Districts Board. Similarly, the creamery movement, which
did so much to strengthen the basis of small-scale farming in
the adjoining areas of Monaghan and south Armagh, never
154
KIN GROUP
KIN GROUP WITH ULSTER'NAME
= i
UNIMPROVED LAND C.IB7O
PARISH BOUNDARY
TOWNLAND BOUMDAF?T
FIG. 2—Kin groups, 1854
Based on thejJrdnance Survey by permission of the Government
found a foothold in this part of Louth. Most significant of all
was the fact that in Cooley the Land Commission, the statutory
"body which implemented the recommendations of the Land
Acts, was satisfied with the mere transference of the ownership
of the existing holdings to the occupying tenants. The present
landscape is thus pre-eminently a product of the landlord era,
and it is therefore proposed to confine this study, for the most
part, to the situation as it existed in the mid-nineteenth
century, when the estate system was still in its prime.
II
In the study of settlement in nineteenth-century Ireland
the ownership of the land is as critical a factor as the nature
of its occupation. In 1854 the condition of land ownership
in Cooley was as follows :
No. of
Estates
6
2
6
6
Valuation
Area
(acres)
£
1,000 &
over
500-1,000
100-500
50-100
%of
Total Area
31,190
82.0
1,450
1,720
3.8
4.0
2.0
750
Twenty individuals were in possession of nine-tenths of the
total area of the region. Only seven of these were resident in
Cooley and of them five lived in Faughart. Among the most
influential of Faughart landlords were J. MacNeill of Ballymascanlan and E. Tipping of Bellurgan. Otherwise the
peninsula was notably an area in the hands of absentees, and to
absentee landlordism is ascribed many of the evils of the Irish
economy in the nineteenth century. Such areas are however of
intrinsic interest to the geographer because they frequently
preserve relict types of land-working and settlement.
Outstanding among Cooley's great landlords was Lord
Clermont whose estate in county Louth in 1878 (Fig. 1)
extended over 20,000 acres and who in this way was one of the
hundred proprietors in 9Ireland at the time whose lands were
valued at over £10,000. Estates of this magnitude were quite
numerous in counties Down and Armagh but they were only
156
rarely encountered in the long and closely settled parts of
northeast Leinster. It was Lord Clermont who was responsible
for the erection, in 1840, of the great mansion at Ravensdale,
overlooking the Gap of the North, one of the last of the many
handsome mansions to be erected in Ireland during the
Ascendancy. The house was the centrepiece of 1,600 acres of
ornamental parkland and one of the largest demesnes to appear
in county Louth. Beyond the demesne walls magnificent
plantations of both native and exotic timber extended high up
the slopes of the valley of the river Flurry.
It was usual in Ireland for the building of a great mansion to
terminate the process of introducing into an area the innovations which were associated with the landlord system. These
included the few attempts made to establish industries in the
Irish countryside, away from the northeast. Thus linen
bleaching and scutching mills, spade factories, an earthenware
factory and limeworks were operating in the Flurry valley in
1840. As elsewhere in Ireland at the time, these industrial
enterprises were short-lived, but their local significance lay in
their being the only forms of industrial activity that were ever
to be introduced into the Cooley peninsula. In conjunction
with the mills, colonies of crofters, many of whom were handloom weavers drawn from the descendants of Ulster Gaels in
Omeath, were established along the hitherto barren slopes of
Anaverna, Doolargy and Ballymakellett. The extensive
reclamation of marginal hill land by these crofter communities
drew the enthusiastic attention of contemporary observers
such as Young and Butler.10 Key workers in the mills and on
the estate were accommodated in a particularly attractive
village specifically built for them alongside the demesne wall.
Among the villagers were families which had been introduced,
sometimes directly from England, to perform services which
Cooley had not hitherto known. Ravensdale was the first
non-farming village ever to appear in the peninsula. The
distribution of such estate settlements in Ireland is as good an
indication as any of those parts where landlordism was most
firmly established. On the other hand the continuing existence
of Irish-speaking communities in close proximity to Ravensdale
is a reminder of the superficial quality of the estate system,
and this no doubt partly accounts for the ease with which it
was ultimately eliminated.
Closely associated with the great estates were those dwellings
which the Ordnance surveyors called ' country
houses' and
which the Tithe Commissioners of 183311 identified as those,
outside the towns, carrying a valuation of £5 and over. Such
dwellings were numerous in parts of Leinster. In Cooley they
157
numbered only 52 out of a total of 2,596 occupied dwellings ;
as many as 62 per cent of the latter total were valued at
ten shillings and under. Such was the dichotomy that prevailed in the countryside. The distribution of these ' country
houses ' (Fig. I) suggests their exclusive nature.
Their
occupants, like the villagers in Ravensdale, were the products
of the Ascendancy and they included privileged tenants,
merchants and estate supervisors, and among the most
elegant of them were the glebe houses of the established church.
In Ireland the estate system came to imply more than a
distinctive pattern of land ownership. It came to have a
direct bearing, from the seventeenth century, on the emerging
arrangements for local government, both secular and ecclesiastical. Following the eclipse of the Catholic parochial system
with the Reformation, the new Protestant and civil parishes
were closely synchronised with the secular estates. Parishes
were created and churches were built contemporaneously with
the allocation of land among the new owners, and in the
absence of any other form of nucleated settlement estate
villages became the new parochial centres. In Cooley the large
civil parishes of Carlingford and Ballymascanlan closely
reflected in extent the Anglesey and Clermont estates
respectively. Similarly a detached portion of the parish of
Ballyboys clearly corresponded to an enclave of land, from
among the former Mellifont property, which had been forfeited
by its Catholic owners and which in the early nineteenth
century formed the Bellurgan estate. Not one of the Catholic
churches in the peninsula occupies a pre-Reformation site and
the modern Catholic parishes, though they may carry12ancient
names, are frequently nineteenth-century creations.
This
lack of continuity in the development of administrative units
has militated against the fixation and expansion of nucleated
settlement in Ireland.
From the seventeenth century even the smaller country
towns fell within the grasp of the omnipotent landlord. Indeed
many of Ireland's smaller towns, like her villages, were the
products of the estate system and they owed their prosperity to
landed patronage. It was only;n those parts of the east which
had escaped plantation that the urban centres, which here
were mainly of medieval origin, escaped such domination.
Such was the town of Carlingford, and it suffered accordingly.
Like many of its counterparts elsewhere in Leinster, it came to
rely on a small class of merchants, with names such as Moore,
Stannus, Darcy and Mateer, for support. A market square,
two streets of tall houses, and a commodious harbour appeared
158
in the late eighteenth century as additions among the town's
many medieval remains, but Carlingford failed to prosper. It
failed, for instance, to attract any of the institutions—workhouses, hospitals, infirmaries and gaols—which were to
implement the Poor Law of 1838, the allocation of which was
largely to govern the relative standing of small towns in
Ireland for more than a century. The institutions that were to
serve Cooley were shared between Dundalk and Newry.
Simultaneously the decline in coastwise and lough traffic and
the growth of land communication made the town's isolation
from the landward even more apparent. Moreover, its frontier
location meant that its population was sharply divided along
sectarian lines. In 1766,1343 per cent of its enumerated population was non-Catholic, and in 1854 of the 111 different
surnames in the town 51 were not repeated elsewhere in the
peninsula. The town therefore carried a substantial intrusive
element in its population and this did not prove to be an asset
in the difficult post-Famine years. In this respect its fate
differed from small towns of similar origin in counties such as
Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny, where a strong Catholic
merchant class was largely responsible for sustaining much
of their small town life in the later nineteenth century. In
Carlingford as many as one-quarter of its dwellings were
deserted in 1854, and this represented a very high ratio even
for mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
Ill
In Cooley a measure of the triumph of the estate system was
the utter absence of the small freeholder. Such freehold land
as existed usually occupied a marginal situation physically
and had been entirely appropriated by the estate owners.
This situation helps to explain the remarkable uniformity that
was characteristic of the economic and social structure of
rural Ireland at the time. There was no room for the innovator
in the pattern of land-use and settlement. Moreover land was
not a marketable commodity, at least in small quantities, and
consequently there was no agricultural ladder to climb and the
distinction between categories of tenants tended to remain
rigid.
The most substantial group of tenants were the leaseholders,
and in Cooley they corresponded closely with the occupiers of
land whose annual valuation exceeded £15 (the' large holdings'
of Fig. 3). There were 177 such tenants as compared with a
total of 1,335 holdings of over 5 acres. At least 70 of the lease159
holders carried ' New English' names. Their holdings were
rarely the product of the consolidation of smaller units, for
the morcellation of large as well as small properties was still
proceeding in the early nineteenth century, partly in order to
accommodate on the land at least a portion of the rapidly
growing population. On the contrary, the larger leasehold
farms were sometimes the residue of former estates, and
frequently included the occupants of the ' country houses.'
A typical representative of such leaseholders was the grazier
or the dealer in cattle. Economic and political conditions in
' colonial' Ireland had always favoured the extensive pastoralist at the expense of the cultivator, and in the nineteenth
century large cattle ranches were found interspersed with
tillage farms over the greater part of the clay plains, especially
on the former granges of Newry abbey, in townlands such as
Monksland, Millgrange and Greenore. This situation was the
product of peculiar historical circumstances rather than a
distinctive response to physical opportunities. Townlands of
this nature would usually carry a large cottier population
(Fig. 4), whose single-roomed dwellings would be strung along
the trackways skirting the edge of the grazier's holding from
which they might periodically rent tiny plots of land for
cultivation on a conacre basis. Thus in Millgrange, out of a
total of 40 households, 25 were landless. In Willville the
corresponding figures were 26 and 18 and in Templetown
60 and 41. In this way the grazier would come to act as a
middleman between the owner of the estate and a large number
of undertenants with a most ephemeral claim on land. If, as
was generally the case, the townland was still the basic unit of
landholding in such an area, it might in this way possess an
empty grassy core dominated by the grazier's mansion and a
fringe of plebeian cultivators. Monksland, Willville and
Ballynamony (Murphy) were examples of this. The presence of
these cottier communities partly explains why so many parts of
the predominantly pastoral coastlands of eastern Ireland
appeared to support a far greater population than similarly
endowed areas in western Britain. The grazier-cottier arrangement may be regarded as the ultimate stage reached in a
landlord-dominated countryside, and in its extreme form it was
best developed in areas such as Meath, east Kildare and north
county Dublin where cattle fattening was the supreme activity.
Sometimes cottier communities would display strong local
kin attachments as if they were deeply rooted in an area. This
was especially true of old-established hamlets such as
.Lemineagh and Roosky (Liberties of Carlingford) and Boharboy
^Muchgrange). In a countryside so sparing in its place-names,
160
LARGER HOLDINGS
FREEHOLD
JOINT ARABLE
' ° °l
I
JOINT PASTURE
I
SMALLHOLDINGS
FIG. 3—The condition of land holding, 1854.
Based on the Ordnance Survey by permission of the Government
ACRES
I20O.
60Q.
--J5OO
_9OO
.300
The proportlonof landless households in
each townlond Is Indicated by the black
sectors
01
to
FIG. 4—The cottier population, 1854.
crossroad hamlets would occasionally be called after the
dominant kin group. If sub-letting took on a more permanent
form, cottier allotments might emerge as diminutive smallholdings, sometimes with each holding composed of a scatter of
tiny parcels of land, as in parts of the Liberties of Carlingford
and Irish Grange. This would partly explain why, even in the
days before the Land Commission intervened, so many of the
smaller farmsteads in Ireland were strung along the roadside
and why it is so difficult to apply the expression ' dispersed
settlement' to any extensive section of the Irish countryside.
Generally, however, the great range of surnames found among
roadside dwellers would betray their diverse and recent origin
and the fact that they too belonged to that numerous section of
the population of nineteenth-century Ireland which was halfitinerant.
These cottier townlands showed some of the highest
population declines in Cooley in the immediate post-Famine
years. Between 1841 and 1861 the population of Whitestown
had been reduced by 66 per cent, Rathcor by 56 per cent and
Willville by 47 per cent. Such catastrophic declines in townlands which in pre-Famine years had shown correspondingly
sharp increases in population may only be interpreted in terms
of the ephemeral nature of cottier settlement. The fate of the
cottier during these turbulent years was in marked contrast to
the strength and stability displayed by the farmers in the same
townlands. The policy of land re-settlement pursued in this
century has frequently entailed the carving of such ranch
townlands among the former cottiers into compact smallholdings which are now the dominant items in the Irish
landscape. Elsewhere the cottier has been replaced by the
wage-earner. The elimination of the cottier has been one of the
most far-reaching consequences of agrarian reform on the
pattern of settlement.
Away from the claylands of the eastern tip of the peninsula
the distinction between the tillage farmer and the grazier
became less evident. In the valley of the river Piedmont (an
area known to the Gael as Tir Deas—fertile or attractive land)
and beyond, in Bellurgan and Faughart, mixed farming and
dispersed settlement prevailed among the larger class of
holdings. The origin of some of the most substantial of these
farms (e.g., Mount Bagnall and Castletown in the Piedmont
valley, each with over 300 acres of improved land) could be
traced back to Norman times. The majority of the larger
holdings in Faughart, Bellurgan, and Piedmont were however
the products of seventeenth-century land grants following on
the confiscation of Catholic property. Such affluent planter
163
families included the Moores of Annaloughan and Rockmarshall, the Dickies of Castlecarragh and the Townleys of
Piedmont. Piedmont house, attractive even in its ruins, dates
back to the late seventeenth century and represents one of the
earliest of the non-castellated mansions to be built in north
Louth.
The area around the head of Dundalk Bay, from the
Piedmont valley to the Flurry estuary, was the scene of most
diligent husbandry. A representative large farm would possess
a complement of extensive outbuildings, orchards, and carefully
maintained gardens, and the whole was frequently contained
within a miniature park, hidden by tall lines of trees. Some
farms also reflected their systematic origin in the arrangement
of their lands in long rectangles running down-slope in the
direction of the shore. Two labourers' hamlets—Newtown and
Riverstown—at either end of the lowest crossing of the
Piedmont river, pointed to the significance of tillage in the
area and suggested the non-traditional relationship between
farmer and worker, whilst the distinctive names given to farms
and to the hamlets themselves indicated the diminishing
significance of the townland as the unit of land working. These
were features which would be more typical of the planted areas
of Ulster than of the long and closely settled coastlands of
Leinster. But the descendants of the original English grantees
in this area had remained unassimilated and in the nineteenth
century their holdings were frequently changing hands. In
our time large tillage farms have found it increasingly difficult
to adapt themsalves to changing circumstances in an
independent Ireland, where successive governments have laid
the greatest stress upon the virtues of small-scale enterprise.
The stranger is thus surprised to find substantial farmsteads in
this section of Cooley either in the charge of elderly celibates
or, alternatively, lying derelict with their spacious halls
serving as shelters for cattle.
In this respect parts of the southeastern claylands, including
the most coveted sections of Cooley in the medieval period,
occupied an anomalous position. Many townlands in the
southeastern end of the peninsula had retaned a strong tillage
tradition on large tenanted farms. Unlike their counterparts in
Piedmont and Faughart, however, these farms were most
frequently in the hands of families bearing old Gaelic and
Catholic names but among whom the Irish language had long
ceased to be spoken. Such a situation was not uncommon along
the Leinster coast northwards from Fingal. Many Gaelic
names from southeast Cooley appear among the substantial
farmers of the early nineteenth-century ' freeholders' lists,
164
though in keeping with the inarticulate nature of Catholic
Ireland at the time they appear to have shunned ostentatious
display. For example like their counterparts elsewhere in east
Leinster, they clung to the traditional form of single-storey
dwelling, which was rarely valued at more than £3.
Most obvious among the traditional characteristics of this
area in the mid-nineteenth century were the holdings which
were organised in unconsolidated strips in large geometrical
openfields, delineated by balks or open ditches and among
which were woven an intricate network of trackways that
suggested jealously guarded land rights. There were a few
surviving examples of whole townlands which served as the
working environs of hamlets of farmers and cottagers. Traces
of such settlements were numerous in northeast Leinster and
some of the most substantial—Swords and Lusk (Co. Dublin)
and Kilsaran and Dromiskin (Co. Louth)—had preserved their
identity because they were church property. Many such
villages, if advantageously placed in relation to the expanding
road and rail network, had taken on and had become dominated
by other functions and had been deserted by their fanning
families. Alternatively, as in the case of Salterstown in east
Louth, their fields had reverted to pasture and the village
had been subsequently abandoned. Sometimes it was found
that, whilst such a village had preserved its outward form,
many of its occupants would have been reduced to landless
labourers. This was the fate of Rathcor in southeast Cooley,
where, by 1854, the former tributary land had been consolidated into a number of large farms, some of whose occupants
bore ' New English ' names.
In Cooley the best surviving example of a farming village
was Whitestown at the southeastern tip of the peninsula
(Fig. 5). It was named after one of the most powerful of AngloNorman families to settle in this part of Louth. In 1854 the
townland of Whitestown consisted of 70 households, and as
many as 50 of them lived within the centrally placed village.
As was frequently the case on these clay plains, the townland
was shared between a number of minor estates, but to its
occupants the townland's boundaries were inviolable in the
sense that none of them held land outside. Only 14 of the
households had a claim, as tenants, on the 360 acres of
cultivated land, and most of the land-holding families had
their farmsteads occupying a central situation within the
village. Consolidated holdings were absent and the largest
farm, of 65 acres, was divided into 19 scattered strips. The
farmers were primarily concerned with the intensive cultivation of cereals and root crops, including wheat and barley,
165
and the rotations involved short, usually annual leys and there
was little provision for permanent pasture. Elsewhere in
such villages—in Swords and Dromiskin, for example—ancient
commonages were devoted to the grazing of cattle. In Whitestown the only communally held land was the mile-long strand
and this arrangement was intended mainly for the harvesting
of sea-wrack for renewing the fertility of the fields. Each of
the 14 landed families, but none other, had a share of this
foreshore.
The farming elite all bore Gaelic names. Unlike neighbouring townlands with openfield relics, there were no descendants
of the ' New English ' in Whitestown, nor was any land held in
fee by its owners. All but one of the farming families were
members of one of three large kin groups14—Kearney, Finnegan
and Murphy—and between them these three extended families
held four-fifths of the total area of the townland. Within the
village, the farm steads tended to be arranged in accordance
with blood ties—the Murphys in the northwest, the Finnegans
in the southwest and the Kearneys in the northeast—suggesting that farms were inherited among the same families over
many generations. The openfield strips were held individually
and within the kin group the proportion of land worked by an
elementary family varied greatly, the smallest holding being
under 5 acres and the largest over 40 acres. Indeed there was a
suggestion of a hierarchical arrangement of landholding among
members of kin groups. On the other hand, the constant
revision necessitated in the field maps of the valuators of the
day indicated that the allocation of the strips was in a state of
continuous change and combinations and new subdivisions
were always appearing.
In contradistinction to the relative affluence of the farmers
in Whitestown was the condition of the 56 landless families,
39 of whom lived in the village in one-roomed dwellings which
were frequently leased from the fanners and which usually fell
within the lowest valuation group (5 to 8 shillings) recorded
anywhere in the country at the time. Here, as so often
in east Leinster, the greatest wretchedness appeared on the
richest lands. Many of these non-landed families relied on the
sea for a living and 30 per cent of county Louth's
total number
of fishermen in 1836 fished off Cooley Point.15 On the other
hand, the absence of any distinctive form of non-landed
settlement and the intimate association of the dwellings of
farmers and non-farmers in Whitestown suggested that they
were closely dependent on one another. It was the presence of
this labouring element which made possible the intensive
working of the openfields in the days before mechanical aids
166
Farmstead
^•'••"••••1
Cottier dwelling
Kin group tcmily
Female htad of household
30
6 0 YARDS
FIG.5— The village of Whitestown, 1854.
167
had been introduced and thus enabled the village community
to survive intact into this century. Even so there was little
evidence of intermarriages between landed and non-landed,
and where there were Kearneys, Murphys and Finnegans
represented among the heads of household of non-landed
families they were invariably women (Fig. 5). Neither was
there evidence of inbreeding among the landless of this remote
community and this may suggest their diverse and recent
origin. Thirty-seven out of a total of 56 landless families bore
different surnames. This contrasted with the solidarity of the
fanners whose descendants in Whitestown today form some of
the largest kin groups in the peninsula.
In most parts of western Europe village life is richest in
areas with a long tillage tradition. In Ireland on the other
hand, because of the peculiar economic and political conditions
prevailing in the early modern period, ancient villages that
have survived are few and settlements that function as villages
are largely the products of the landlord system. Thus,
Whitestown, despite its size, never acquired any functions
other than those intimately related to the material needs of
the local fanning community—a smithy, a corn mill or a
joiner's shop. Its presence was thus felt only locally.16 The
strength of Whitestown lay in its demographic composition.
This enabled the high proportion of incomplete households
(20 out of 70 families were headed by females) of the immediate
post-Famine years to survive as independent units and to
participate in the communal arrangements. This is a leading
feature of a familial society, whether settlement be nucleated
or not. In this case it served to preserve the integrity of the
kinship system and also acted as a check on the infiltration of
outsiders as tenants.
IV
•
A leading feature in the development of the Irish economy, j
over the last two centuries has been the growth of the small- j
holding as the most typical kind of farming unit. Smallholdings, if denned as being those farms which were valued in
the mid-nineteenth century at between £5 and £15 (so as to
exclude the diminutive and short-lived cottier lettings) were,
however, in a minority along the immediate coastlands of
eastern Leinster. In general, at this time, localities of smallholders belonged to areas of late and marginal settlement and
were especially associated with regions which had suffered
involuntary colonisation as a result of plantation and eviction
168
elsewhere. Thus whilst in Cavan and Monaghan the smallholding was already dominant, in Cooley the distribution of
small farm localities was quite fragmentary (Fig. 3).
The smallholding was, in many ways, the most typical
product of large-scale landlordism and as such was best
developed in Cooley on the Anglesey and Clermont estates.
Smallholder localities prevailed in the topographically confused
foothills where the hummocky gabbro slopes were encumbered
with glacial debris, as on Barnavave and Slievenaglogh. They
were also found perched aloft in the basin of the Ryeland river
in Omeath and across the watershed in Glenmore, wherever
there were high reaches of drift. In Faughart the larger farms
tended to give way to the smaller where the loamy shale ridges
yielded to the granitic high plain along the Armagh border.
It is, of course, incorrect to view these marginal areas as being
of necessity areas of late colonisation and settlement. On the
contrary, the light and well drained soils of the east and
south-facing foothills of Cooley showed the most numerous
traces of former house-clusters and their associated enclosures. Indeed, if we accept the contention that the small
holding, as we know it in Ireland, appeared late in the evolving pattern of land tenure, there are reasons for believing that
some of the earliest examples of compact small farms to appear
in Cooley were to be found along the eastern foothills of the
Barnavave ridge, which separates Glenmore from the eastern
plains. This was an area which the historian would identify
as being an ' Irishry' in the Middle Ages, and in the seventeenth century these slopes formed the only section of the
peninsula, away from the clay plains, to be allocated in townlands among minor estates. Likewise the pre-plantation origin
of these small farm communities is suggested in the fact that
their leading surnames are not dominantly associated with
Ulster.
Townlands such as Irish Grange, Rath, Mullaghattin,
Ballaverty and Earls Quarter were aligned along the slopes of
the Barnavave ridge in the form of triangles, with tapering
strips of communally managed souming or grazing land
extending to the crest of the ridge, whilst an apron of irregular
and sporadic enclosure for cultivation below suggested a
piecemeal colonisation from the wasteland in pre-landlord
times. It is important, in this respect, to realise that with
the triumph of landlordism in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, opportunities for periodic expansion on to the waste
to support an increasing population ceased, even in the hills,
and the progress of settlement came to be rigidly controlled.
It is for this reason that in Cooley unregulated colonisation
169
by smallholders in the modern period was almost confined to
the former burghal lands of the town of Carlingford and to the
common land attached to the parish on the slopes of Slieve
Foy. Here the tiny patchwork of stone-wall enclosures on the
gabbro crags still give the impression of land stolen from the
waste in haste by a destitute element in the community. It is
the appropriation of the unenclosed land by individual estate
owners in the eighteenth century and earlier which also
accounts for the absence from east Leinster, away from the
edge of the great bogs of the Midlands, of any extensive traces of
squatting. In Cooley, even at the height of population pressure
in the early years of the nineteenth century, squatter colonies
were confined to small groups of dwellings perched on the clay
cliffs overlooking the seashore in Rampark and Maddoxland in
Piedmont, or alternatively they were relegated to the edge of
the raised beach marshland in Millgrange and Greenore.
On the basis of their outward form, their internal organisation, and their historical associations, it is possible to identify
three types of smallholder localities in mid-nineteenthcentury Cooley.
In parts of Faughart, along the south facing slopes of the
hills from Bellurgan to Castletown and on the intermediate
slopes in Glenmore, there occurred nests of compact small
farms, averaging in size between 10 and 20 acres and with
regularly dispersed steadings. In Faughart, where this type
•was best developed—in Proleek, Whitemill, Annies and
Drumnasillagh, for example—no unenclosed land remained
for individual appropriation, no land was communally managed
and there were few landless families. The farmstead was
frequently found at the head of a boreen or lonan, which linked
it with an arterial trackway. Economically it represented the
nearest approach to self-supporting family fanning in the
peninsula. Inbreeding was unimportant but this did not
preclude the collective organisation of such localities in order
to perform some of the more arduous tasks of the farming year.
Ulster names predominated among the small farmers of
Faughart and Irish was widely spoken in this area in the early
nineteenth century. In many ways this section of north Louth
represented an over-spill of features more typical of the plains
of Killevy in adjoining Armagh.
The second type of smallholder locality had been sytematically created, mainly in the eighteenth century, by the
leading landowners, with either of two objectives in view—
the rearrangement of existing small farm communities or,
alternatively, the creation of new settlements on reclaimed or
marginal land. Such holdings took the form of long, narrow
170
and parallel rectangles, which were coupled by linear roads,
and the inclination of the rectangles was mainly dictated by
the direction of slope and the flow of water. Usually each
holding was initially made up of two rectangles which were not
necessarily adjacent to one another and which were frequently
allotted in pairs because they consisted each of land of
differing quality. Sometimes the one involved the enclosure of
part of the townland that had seen long and continuous
cultivation whilst the other was a new appropriation from the
waste. Such holdings continued to exercise souming rights
over any open land remaining within the townland. The strips
themselves were designed for cultivation and represented a
compromise between the traditional openfield on the one hand
and enclosure in a tiny patchwork of fields on the other. Each
strip was in effect an openfield worked by a single family and
within the enclosed land it was still necessary to tether livestock during parts of the year. For this reason the most
formidable and permanent division within a strip townland
was that which separated the open pastures from the worked
land.
In terms of the extent of the territory involved alone, the
strip form of enclosure remains the greatest memorial to the
amount of energy that was devoted to the reorganisation of
the Irish countryside in the eighteenth century. In the remoter
parts of the country the whole of the cultivated area was
involved in such strip division. In Cooley, as elsewhere in east
Leinster, it was confined to recently reclaimed hill slopes and
sea-plains. In Glenmore, parts of Omeath and among the
crofter-weavers of Ravensdale, strip farms represented the
ultimate altitudinal limit ever reached by enclosure. Less
imposing but more durable were the attempts made to drain
and enclose in a similar fashion the raised-beach sea plains
in Bellurgan and Greenore.
Such a system of re-settlement, although it appeared farreaching in its thoroughness, did not necessarily entail the
break-up of the communities involved. Indeed in Omeath and
Glenmore the existing form of settlement—usually a small
cluster of houses—remained intact and the kin groups were
left undisturbed. In such strip localities inbreeding thus
remained a leading characteristic and landless families would be
few. Even the sea plain reclamation schemes appear to have
involved the re-settlement of whole communities rather than a
piecemeal introduction of new families. Thus in Bellurgan, out
of a total of 105 households, 70 bore surnames which occurred
more than once in the townland. In Ballymakellett the
corresponding totals were 76 and 55. Kin solidarity alone,
171
however, did not save these strip townlands from the purge
of early and massive emigration in the post-Famine vears.
Between 1841 and 1861 the total losses in three strip townlands in Glenmore were as follows : Castletown declined from
•805 to 345, Glenmore from 506 to 258 and Spellickanee from
71 to 21. In this way strip and cottier townlands shared in the
highest aggregate losses of population in Cooley in the immediate post-Famine years and the strip is now the most conspicuous type of abandoned enclosure in the peninsula.
The oldest form of small-scale farming prevailing in nineteenth-century Ireland was that which involved the working of
unenclosed arable and pasture land on a communal basis.
In Leinster the type had become confined to marginal pockets
of resistance or of refuge and the most notable examples of
such communities occupied the high and lonely western glens
of the Wicklow mountains. In Cooley such communal arrangements had remained intact only in areas beyond the upper
limit of general enclosure in Glenmore, Omeath, and Ballyjnakellett.
In Omeath, where the joint family arrangements were best
preserved among the ' old people who worked the heights'
of the upper basin of the Ryeland river, the unit of land
•working was the cuibhreann (a share) and the unit of land
holding was the cineadh (the kin group). Single townlands
such as Cornamucklagh, Lislea, Ardaghy and Bavan were
occupied by three or four joint families, each with its own tiny
house-cluster. In Ardaghy, for example, 440 acres of improved
land were shared between groups of 14, 14 and 11 joint
families, respectively, in roughly equal proportions, and,
-unlike in the plains village, each family within the group had
an even share. There were few hearths without kin ramifications and landless families were rare. Kin groups frequently
"bore well-known Ulster names such as Traynor, Rice, Hanlon,
Fearon, Donnelly and O'Neill. Families participating in the
•communal arrangements never held or worked land on an
individual basis and the interests of groups were strictly
-confined to the townlands which contained their houseclusters. The significance of the kinship system was further
enhanced by the fact that skills were frequently inherited
among families. In Omeath the MacCourts were traditionally
accepted as stonemasons, the Fearons were butchers, whilst
the MacHughs were poets. In addition each townland would
possess its handymen—fish cadgers, travelling hucksters,
pahvees (pedlars of cloth) and cattle and sheep jobbers. Young
-women would accept seasonal domestic work in England and
Scotland. Omeath men fished in the lough for oysters and
' 172
mussels and for herring out to sea. It was perhaps this varied,
if precarious, basis which enabled these barren uplands to
support as great a population density as anywhere in Louth at
the time, as well as to delay the post-Famine exodus until
late in the nineteenth century. Between 1841 and 1861 the
population decline for the whole peninsula amounted to 34 per
cent; in Omeath the corresponding figure was 21 per cent.
This may be one indication of the tenacity of openfield farming,
arising out of the obligations to kin which it entailed.
The Cooley landscape has been examined as it appeared
in the mid-nineteenth century at a time when the estate system
of land holding was still intact. The basic dichotomy involved
the contrasts between the economic and social situation
prevailing on the richer clay plains on the one hand, and those
localities which occupied physically marginal situations to
these plains, on the other. The plains were farmed by
privileged tenants employing a large cottier population and
the main aim was the production of crops and livestock for
the British market. Elsewhere farming was on a small scale
and the holdings were largely self-sufficient and worked by
elementary families or occassionally by kin groups. The
dichotomy tended to involve areas which were mutually
exclusive (Fig. 3), and in Cooley this had an obvious physical
basis. The ensuing contrasts in settlement patterns and
population distribution, however, may only be understood in
terms of the history of the occupation of the areas concerned.
NOTES
1
In Ireland hereditary names were adopted early, and because the
internal movement of population has been relatively slight such names
are still frequently found in areas where they originated. As such,
local surnames may throw light on the origin and composition of the
modern population. See R. E. Matheson, Special Report on Surnames in
Ireland (Dublin, 1909); E. MacLysaght, Irish Families (Dublin, 1957)
and More Irish Families (Galway, 1960).
2
The Book of Survey and Distribution for East Meath and Louth
(1641).
3
The Down Survey Barony Map for Dundalk (1655-'58).
4
The sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant colonists in
Ireland were known as the 'New English' to distinguish them from the
descendants of the Anglo-Norman and Catholic 'Old English.' See
S. 5Pender, A Census of Ireland, c. 1659 (Dublin, 1939).
List of Registered Freeholders of County Louth (1821).
6
Irish Folklore Comm. MS 1503, p. 163.
173
7
All references to the year 1854, including the illustrations, are based
(unless otherwise stated) on the maps and books of the Primary
Valuation of Ireland.
8
Land was rarely specifically enclosed for grazing purposes in the
hills of Ireland. The upper limit of the maintained field boundaries
usually coincided with the limits of cultivation. Thus the land use
categories adopted for the Wicklow Mountains by the Tithe Commissioners (1833) were 'arable,' 'coarse arable,' 'mountain' and 'bog.'
9
U. H. Hussey de Burgh, The Landowners of Ireland (Dublin, 1878).
10
A. W. Hutton (Ed.), Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland (1776-1779)
(London, 1892), 115; 'Extracts from Isaac Butler's Journal, 1744,"
Jl. 11of the Co. Louth Arch. Soc., V, 2, p. 100.
Tithe Applotment Book for Carlingford parish (1833). In P.R.O.,
Dublin.
12
See J. Blanchard, Le Droit Ecclésiastique Contemporain d'Irlande
(Paris,
1958), chapt. 1.
13
Tomás ó Fiaich (Ed.), 'The 1766 religious census for some county
Louth
parishes,' Jl. of the Co. Louth Arch. Soc., XIV, 2.
14
A kin group is defined as consisting of four or more families within a
single
townland and with the same surname.
15
The First Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of
Irish
Fisheries, 1838.
16
Contrast similar farming villages in northwest Pembrokeshire,
Wales, which acquired branch chapels in the early nineteenth century
and thereby became the centres of extensive neighbourhoods.
174